Chapter Five #3
Linnet knew that some smaller monasteries and priories didn’t have servants, but on this small island, the Priory relied on the villagers for most of the hard work that kept it going.
In turn, the villagers clearly had pride in ‘their’ Priory, even if they grumbled about the monks and their ways.
It was the focus of the island, most of the houses clustered at its skirts, and the inn just outside the Priory gates.
The farms spread out further away, but the farmers’ wives were often in the courtyards, visiting Ann with meat or cheese, or collecting their loaves from the Priory bakehouse.
The Prior spent a lot of time with the fishermen, talking to them about their catch and getting them to row him to Inner Farne, or Seahouses.
She sometimes saw him looking at them, as they sat and knotted nets, with something almost like envy, and wondered if he came from a seafaring family.
Godfreyd though, he kept himself apart from all the villagers, speaking to them only if he had to, speaking to the younger monks and the novices as if he were in charge of them, which made it all the stranger that he was talking to her now.
He was the Infirmarian but it was odd he preferred to stand back and let others do the leeches and the cleaning and so on.
Unlike other infirmarians she’d known, he never added his own remedies or corrections to his leech book and just copied remedies entire.
She stifled a laugh as she realised a patient who was already dead was probably his perfect patient.
Oh God, was she laughing about Oswyn already when he’d not even been dead hours?
She caught a flash of movement behind Godfreyd – Isabelle again, running now. She got up to leave and he reluctantly stood aside. What had he actually been trying to ask her?
She spent the rest of the morning working on the prayer book, losing herself in the curves of the ink on the page.
Lady Margaret had asked for it to be ‘plain and useful’.
She’d not met the woman but she knew a Lady’s idea of plain would be ornate nonetheless.
She’d heard from Oswyn that Lady Margaret was not a great lady, although her husband, Lord Edmund D’Aganet, was part of the Percy family, if a distant part.
She was a young wife he’d married after he was widowed last year, and not from a high family.
Doubtless she would spend his money on whatever caught her fancy, and for now it was a prayer book.
Putting down her quill, she laid her desk plank flat, picked up her pricker and began to mark out a cat, curled up sleeping in the capital letter of the prayers for serenity.
She gave it something of the look of Tibet.
As she was planning the colours, looking at her inks to see what she had, the blues of Oswyn’s body flashed back into her mind again.
She shuddered. He’d looked so very cold.
On impulse, she decided to go and see his body in the Infirmary.
She couldn’t understand what had happened and she needed to know as much as she could, it was the only way she might remain safe.
She could go into some of the rooms of the Priory, but not all.
The Scriptorium obviously, although the older monks called it the stores room, from when it used to house barrels that weren’t in use.
It had been cleared out a few years ago but still wasn’t really the best room to use for scribing.
The best rooms had large openings in the wall and took in all the daylight.
Her Scriptorium only got light for a few short hours in the middle of the day during the winter, although summer would give her more time to scribe and illuminate, if she was still there then.
She had never entered the Refectory, nor the Chapter House, but the Infirmary was always needing someone to carry herbs in, or ointments out, or have words added to the leech book, so it wouldn’t cause anyone to notice if she went and had a look now.
Women weren’t generally allowed into any of the inner rooms of the Priory, but somehow Linnet was tolerated.
Ann had taken advantage of this and Linnet was not averse to borrowing tinctures or herbs for her when asked.
Ann made her own remedies which the island women came to her for, and coveted Godfreyd’s wide range of tonics, left from an older monk who had cared about curing his brothers.
Ann and Linnet both knew that he was careless enough not to notice if the odd bottle or vial went missing from amongst the massed ones on the dusty shelves.
The Infirmary was dark, a single candle lit by the door in the stone room which lay in the corner of the outer wall, just behind the guest room the Inspector was staying in.
The shutters were closed ‘to keep the vapours from spreading’ Godfreyd always said.
He wasn’t in there. A dead body didn’t really require a lot of attention after all.
Oswyn was swaddled on the bed with herbs burning in saucers near him, as if helping him breathe.
The smoke from them caught at her throat a little.
She crept closer. She thought he would seem smaller in death.
All that hot air gone, all his self-importance gone.
Somehow though, he seemed longer, more substantial.
He’d been short and puffed up but now he was solid, a lump of flesh.
She gingerly unwrapped his hands; was she going to hold one while she said a prayer?
What had come over her? This was a man she didn’t like – hadn’t liked – and who would have been able to destroy her, if he had the right one of her secrets. But something drew her to his corpse.
‘Are you the scribe woman?’
The voice from the doorway was the novice. She jumped slightly, a voice in her head reminding her: not dead, not dead, not dead.
She turned. ‘Yes?’
‘What ails the Brother?’
What had the Prior decided was wrong with him? Flux. ‘The Infirmarian says flux, or something similar.’
He took a careful step back but she couldn’t see his face, just his outline against the light from the outside.
‘You’d better wash well before ye sees the Inspector. He wants notes taking. Who is the Brother?’
‘Brother Oswyn. Why doesn’t the Inspector use you to write his notes?’
Linnet had spoken without thinking but the novice replied anyway.
‘My scribing ain’t up to much yet. He says I’m to practise my lessons more before I can write for him.’
He left, crossing himself and muttering a quick prayer for the sick monk.
Linnet realised she’d been holding the dead man’s hand tightly and let go abruptly.
The cold from him had seeped into her. As she let go, one of his fingernails caught her.
Startled, she looked more closely at his hands.
They were cut and bloodied and his nails were torn.
He must have been scrabbling at the rocks and trying to get out of the sea.
But if he were near the rocks, he could have climbed out surely?
That part of the beach was shallow, the fishermen had to push their boats a way out unless the tide was right up.
He normally started his swim there, so strange to drown right at the beginning when he was at his strongest and warmest. She noticed his face had a cut across it too – on his cheek – the sides of the cut open and fleshless. Was this really a drowning?
She needed to ask Tom about how a man drowned. The fishermen didn’t like talking about the sea’s dangers, even mentioning the words was seen as bad luck. But Tom might answer some of her questions.
With her prayer interrupted, the impulse seemed foolish. She’d spent her life in priories and cathedrals but her conversations with God were strictly limited, and always through her saint, like others she knew. Speaking to God directly was for men of the Church.
Her hands scrubbed clean, and ready with a fresh quill and her best oak gall ink, she knocked on the Prior’s parlour where the Inspector had settled himself and his papers.
If he wanted to make use of her skills did that mean he wouldn’t put her in his report?
He might. She would keep her head down and say as little as possible.
The fire was roaring. The Inspector had made himself comfortable in the Prior’s rooms, chair pulled up to the warmth, desk near him with papers spread across it.
He didn’t look up as she came in, just waved her to the corner impatiently.
She looked around wondering what he wanted her to do.
Nothing struck her so she just stood there, feeling foolish – but warm and foolish.